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Hewlett-Packard donates blade cluster to FreeBSD

The FreeBSD Foundation received a donation of a blade system from
Hewlett-Packard for use as a third-party software build cluster.
This 20-node HP BladeSystem cluster triples the speed of the build
process for i386 packages.

"With this generous donation from HP, we are able to continuously
produce up-to-date packages from more than 13000 ports of third-party
software available in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, at about three
times the rate of the previous hardware cluster," said Kris Kennaway,
member of the FreeBSD Port Management Team.

"This directly benefits the users of FreeBSD through the rapid
availability of new and updated software packages, and through the
increased testing and QA of FreeBSD that the new hardware allows."

"We at HP recognize the important role of FreeBSD in the Internet's
global network infrastructure, and we are happy that the HP
BladeSystem cluster can contribute to the on-going success of the
FreeBSD Foundation," said Mark Potter, vice president of the
Hewlett-Packard BladeSystem division.

"They're just standard i386 systems, architecturally, with a very
nice ssh- and serial-based management server," said Kennaway, who
maintains the FreeBSD Ports cluster.

Kennaway said FreeBSD has a few dozen other machines scattered
around the globe for package builds. A big concentration of sparc
machines hosted by Hiroki Sato in Japan include some large
multiprocessor e4500's (10, 12 and 14 CPUs) that have been extremely
valuable for SMP testing. Also, a couple of machines hosted by ISC,
an amd64 hosted by Scott Long, three i386 machines at Yahoo! Korea,
and sometimes Kennaway's own machines in Canada are used for the
official package builds.

The HP BladeSystem cluster is hosted at the Yahoo! datacenter in
the San Francisco Bay area. In addition to Kennaway, Paul Saab
and Peter Wemm from the FreeBSD project, and John Cagle from HP
helped with blade system setup.

About The FreeBSD Project

The FreeBSD Project provides an up-to-date and scalable modern operating
system that offers high-performance, security, and advanced networking for
personal workstations, Internet servers, routers, and firewalls. The
FreeBSD packages collection includes popular software like Apache Web
Server, Gnome, KDE, X.org X11 Window System, Python, Mozilla, and over
13,000 software suites. FreeBSD can be found on the Internet at
http://www.FreeBSD.org.